These sonatas are forever linked with two of the great 20th-century Russian pianists, Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels, but the young Moscow-born Boris Giltburg brings them right up to date with playing of terrific panache and personality, digging deep into the fabric of the music to illuminate its emotional content and harnessing an authoritative bravura to underline the savagery and nervy energy that the scores often convey. He has the confidence and facility of technique to tackle some movements at intrepid speed: the inexorable propulsion of the second movement of the Sixth Sonata is taken at a true allegretto rather than the andante that its textural complexities sometimes impose, and the finale of the Seventh Sonata starts — and moreover maintains — a terrifying impetus in response to Prokofiev’s precipitato marking. If you can do it at this speed, while still ensuring that all the cross-keyboard leaps and offbeat accents are firmly in place, why not?

Yehudi Menuhin saw Schumann’s D minor Violin Concerto of 1853 as a missing link between Beethoven and Brahms. The reason it had been missing was that the great Hungarian virtuoso Joseph Joachim, whose artistry had inspired Schumann to write the piece in the first place, never performed it in public and, moreover, suggested that it be suppressed until a century after the composer’s death.